Annamaria Zanella & Doris Kaiser

The work of Annamaria Zanella (b. 1966 in Sant'Angelo di Piove / Padua, Italy) makes some of the most important and innovative statements to be found in contemporary jewellery. In her powerfully expressive compositions, sculptural and painterly qualities are united to reveal her affinities with contemporary art – iron, steel glass, acrylic, paper, aluminium and other materials – quickened and heightened by pigments and gold.

Annamaria Zanella is regarded as the leading exponent of the so-called "Paduan School" in her generation. She also studied sculpture at the Venice Fine Art Academy. Developed in collaboration with the goldsmith herself, the presentation of her work in the Design Collection rooms shows her most important pieces of the past ten years. 


The sculptural plastics of Doris Kaiser  are concrete art and bring up for discussion at the same time also perceptions and feelings in different aspects. The special characteristic these works owe first of all to the contrasting use of gypsum and clay/tone, which stress the senses in their contrast on the highest. It aims clearly in its artistic intention over a purely formal, the pure perception process intending aspect outside and ties indirectly to the experience potential of the viewer, who connects also direct own feelings with materials, surfaces and bodies. The analogies in their work with human attitudes and feelings, which are reminiscent alone by the conceptualnesses of covering, filling, protection, outer skin, in the long runness, the tactil and change, are consciously set and in opposite standpoint brought to an apparently cooling mathematical construction. The clay/tone is released thereby to the “deputy” of humans, who are embedded in given - stare sometimes - however always less flexible structures and itself there moved, hurt and also again protected and protected to feel can.

Dr. Gabriele Uelsberg, Rheini federal state museum Bonn